iSource Picks of the Week

Welcome to our weekly installment of Picks of the Week at iSource where we provide our expanded coverage of Apple accessories and applications Here we will promote our favorite iPhone, iPad, iPod, Mac and Apple TV related items, as well as bring you occasional tips and tricks. Hopefully many of our favorite items will also be of interest to you. Please feel free to comment on our selections, and suggest picks of your own. Check out this week’s picks after the break

Just Mobile Encore iPad Stand

OK, I’ll admit right up front that I may need to join some sort of iPad stand-aholics group or risk being the subject of a reality show 10 years from now when I live in a trailer surrounded by iPad stands and Labradors.

As in, I’m a big (big!) fan of iPad stands. I have five of them within arm’s reach as I write this – including my new favorite, the Just Mobile Encore iPad Stand.

Reasons why it’s my new favorite. It’s extremely handsome and smart looking. It’s also very lightweight and easy to move around and fit in different spots on my desk. And it has a very clever design, with a rubberized arm that adjusts incredibly easily to offer great viewing and working (typing) angles for the iPad or iPad 2. Oh, and it’s the first iPad stand I’ve found that works very well as both desktop and portable stand.

iA Writer for the Mac (v1.1.1)

My pick of the week is iA Writer for the Mac. It has no preferences, no font settings, and no colors. All that it really has is full screen mode, a blinking blue cursor, and a focus mode that blurs out everything but my current sentence. It makes for a great writing environment.

It’s also fully Lion compatible, and works very nicely with live Markdown previews for text. If you like iA Writer for the iPad, it’s a cinch to pick the Mac version up, despite the $18 price tag. I was a bit worried about this purchase at first, but I’m now completely happy with having spent the money.

WhereFortune (v2.30)

This week I am going for “entertainment purposes only” in my pick with WhereFortune. Astrological horoscopes play a fun part of people’s lives – otherwise why would Facebook walls be littered them? Whether you agree or not, there is some fun in seeing what could be said about one’s daily fortune. This appealingly designed app for bothe the iPhone and iPad has a daily horoscope that is specific to you, based on your accurate birth information, your current location, and the stars and planets in the heavens (and where they would be in your birth chart).

It isn’t another beer-drinking, sound-making app that was prevalent in the App store during its infancy. WhereFortune is intriguingly accurate, and worth the “entertainment” you get from it.

Kinetic (v1.0)

Kinetik is my Pick this week, drawing me in because of its simple approach to app recommendations. This new release essentially lets you share apps you like to friends and followers. But it’s a network as well so you can view all recommendations, or those from your followers and especially check out their brief tags or comments on why they liked a particular app. The UI is nice – red with nice nav on the bottom that show your activity feed (latest shares), all apps, a sharing button, people (leaderboard, suggested users) and profile information. It works well although I must admit it took me a while to figure how to actually share an app (no, the large prominently centered “share” button was no giveaway). You can also browse apps by category and see what’s trending (on the Kinetik network of course).

To share or add an app to your recommendations, press share then search (through the iTunes store) by name. It’s a pity that it does not allow you to look through the apps on the iPhone itself though. Hopefully this will be made possible in a future update.

I’ve always hated the “Rate my app now” prompt. I always click away “No thanks” even if I love an app, because there is no way that I feel like filling in a password and writing a lengthy piece on the iTunes store at that very moment. With Kinetik, I can easily share my thumbs up for an app of my choice and browse through other real life recommendations. I doubt that I will be compelled to join and be active in yet another community, but it’s nice to know that I can browse through if I have time. Oh and the best part is that it’s free.

The only thing I’d need now is a network for recommendations of apps NOT to download.

Simon’s Cat in “’Purrfect Pitch’ (v1.2)

Simon’s Cat is a fun app I downloaded this week on a whim, costing me all of .79 Euro cents. You must know that I’m definitely a Cat Person (sorry Dog Lovers!) and prone to browsing youtube for amusing cat videos. Any Cat Person who has ever enjoyed Simon’s Cat videos knows what I’m talking about. You recognize your own cat in Simon’s cat (check out this homepage for links and info on Simon’s Cat).

So what do you get with this app? Well, it falls into the Talking Tom category – it’s loads of fun when showing it to friends and children but not necessarily for regular or daily use. It’s a musical app/game that lets you compose tunes with the sounds coming out as purrs, an activity that surprisingly amuses for a quite a while. If you want something more stimulating you can choose “Challenge” mode which tests your memory skill and ability to mimic the melodies without a mistake. And don’t get me wrong, it’s hard! If you fail you have to start over. All in all, loads of fun that will make you smile and keep children of all ages amused.

9/11 Memorial Guide (v1.0)

As everyone knows, this Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the terror attacks that were carried out on 9/11. My pick this week is an official app of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. If you plan to visit the 9/11 Memorial, this app will help you explore the arrangement of names, and locate sponsored cobblestones on the Memorial Plaza. In addition, you can listen to remembrances of those who lost their lives on that tragic day spoken by their family and friends.